You can’t tell by just looking at a group of orcas, but they actually travel in pods, which are family groups. There are three pods of resident orcas, or killer whales, which live in the Salish Sea. These groups are known as J, K and L pods. Each pod uses specific calls or combinations of calls to communicate with each other. These calls can also be used to identify them as a group. You can learn to identify these calls—it just takes practice.

Listen to the top ten calls and call combinations used by Southern Resident Orcas. One way to remember these calls is to match each one with a sound you already know. Do you agree with the descriptions we chose for each sound?

Call Library

Call

Play

Sounds like

S1

A cowboy saying "Yee-haw!"
Used mostly by J Pod but shared by all 3 [Spectrogram]